> This requires human moderation but we could surely build tooling to detect if a conversation is heated and force people to take a breather.
But who gets to decide what a heated conversation looks like and who should take a breather? This is the fundamental problem that we can't seem to agree on as a society.
We do agree though that almost all political discussions are flame wars, we just think the other guy is the problem. I think just adding cool down periods when two people are rapidly responding would go a long way, as well as giving users a timeout from one another if this happens often.
My personal opinion is that not being able to see the other person's face when you're communicating with them is a big part of the problem. Perhaps a cooldown period would help and I'm all for trying to find ways to improve discourse online, but at the same time, the psychology of being able to say whatever hateful thing you want because the other person is hundreds if not thousands of miles away drives a lot of this behavior. This is true of forums, gaming chats, etc.
But who gets to decide what a heated conversation looks like and who should take a breather? This is the fundamental problem that we can't seem to agree on as a society.